The Republicans have been shouting from the rooftops that Vice President Kamala Harris is “dangerously liberal” ever since it was announced that she would be the presidential nominee for the November elections.
The Republican National Committee also released a two-minute campaign ad that highlights an incident which occurred in 2008 when a San Francisco woman was attacked by a man who was in the United States illegally. He had been arrested a few months earlier on drug charges but released as part of a programme launched by Harris, who was then district attorney.
The assault victim, Amanda Kiefer, 45 said in an interview with ABC News, “When a policy negatively affects you, you wake up.”
She said Harris’ analogy between herself and Trump, where she calls Trump a convicted felon and herself a tough prosecutor, was “laughable”.
The Republican campaign advertisement says Harris allowed illegal immigrant drug dealers to enter job training instead of entering prison.
The programme was called Back on Track and it was a “smart on crime” initiative that was supposed to reduce rates of recidivism by empowering lower-level nonviolent offenders to redirect their lives away from crime. Criminals who did the job training and took part in the programme would later have their records expunged.
However, Harris herself admitted in 2009 in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that there was a huge loophole in the programme that let criminals who were in the country receive job training and remain free, even though they couldn’t lawfully obtain a job.
“If people who committed crimes were allowed to stay out of prison to train for jobs they couldn’t legally hold, I think most Americans would disapprove of that,” Kiefer said.
In fact, Harris had said even at that time: “I believe we fixed it. So moving forward, it is about making sure that no one enters Back on Track if they cannot hold legal employment.”
However, Trump and his Republican Party can’t seem to let go and want to bring back this story from 2008 to veto Harris’ tough stand on crime policy.
Trump attacked Harris the same way in 2020. He used Kiefer’s story to attack Harris for what he claims was her support for what he says were “deadly sanctuary cities.”
His exact words then were, “As district attorney in San Francisco, Kamala put a drug-dealing illegal alien into a job programme instead of into prison. Four months later, the illegal alien robbed a 29-year-old woman, mowed her down with an SUV, fracturing her skull and ruining her life. We believe our country should be a sanctuary for law-abiding Americans, not for ‘criminal aliens.”